Yes, but old habits die hard. Living in Boulder county, I can assure you that in 2004 a measure to spend $1.4 M/year on a helicopter was just barely defeated by ~500 votes for, you guessed it, wildland fire-suppression.
Air-tankers? That wouldn’t be useful for deep-forest fire-suppression, now would it.
I’ll be back later to provide you with more cites of wildland fire-fighters doing deep-forest fire suppression. Also, I heard a “Talk of the Nation” on NPR in 2004 that discussed just this thing, I’ll dig around the NPR archives to see if I can find it.
I remember the time John Stossel attacked Lego for selling model sets that were too difficult for parents to assemble. Haven’t paid attention to him since.
You’re misinterpreting what’s happened. After decades of fighting any and all forest fires, government agencies realized that they were making a bad situation worse, but then swung too far the other way. The big Yellowstone fire demonstrated that, because of the policies of prior decades, so much fuel had accumulated in the forests, they couldn’t simply “let it burn.” The resulting fires tended to run away, causing massive losses, threatening communities, and so on.
So, they’ve been trying to fine-tune the approach: let some fires burn, start some fires intentionally, but suppress other fires, particularly those that have the potential for causing too much damage.
I’m curious. Do you fall into that camp of people who think that the national forests should be thrown open to unrestricted harvesting, who think that the forests are simply a source of raw materials that should be made available to the timber companies, who think that “those damned environmentalists” are just a bunch of tree huggers, hurting our economy, and yet, think that the government shouldn’t be trying to keep the “crop” from burning to the ground?
Well, when fires start, and forest managers are sitting in the command center with their fire-commanders saying to themselves, “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” people always tend to go for fire suppression. I think that fires should be permitted to burn basically unrestriced except for structure or other resource protection. And homeowners that have been negligent in properly clearing brush that live in fire-risk zones should be charged for the emergency brush-clearing and structure protection that fire-fighters put their lives on the line to do. Frankly, they haven’t done much to, “fine-tune their approach.”
Getting to your bigger question, no I don’t fundamentally disagree with the National Forest system. I have a lot of criticisms of how they operate often, but no I don’t think that we should permit unrestricted forresting. I just think that Stossel had a good point of how private land owners often take a more intelligent approach to the land management issues than the government does. This thread was about John Stossel after all.
I can say the same thing about you, you think Stossel’s bias is mild while Carville’s bias is “huge”. To me Stossel is about as biased as Carville or Limbaugh, which makes his stories a front for his political opinions a good deal of the time. I personally just want the stories, not to be given strawmen arguments (which is what Captain Lance Murdoch referred to when he started this thread) then tearing them down to justify a certain political philosophy.
The point of the foods peice was that to support his claims he cited what he claimed were a bunch of studies that ABC news commissioned that were, according to him, the first to compare bacterial content between organic vs. non-organic food. The problem was, many of the claimed studies whos results Stossel cited were never actually done in the first place. In other cases, the researchers who did the tests were happy to conduct them according to ABC News’ direction, but informed them almost three months before broadcast that the tests ABC News had them run actually couldn’t establish what ABC News claimed, because they hadn’t been asked to test for the correct things.
This is especially silly considering that Stossel does things on his show like hold up a bag of lettuce and intone: “Shouldn’t we do a warning that says this stuff could kill you, and buying organic could kill you?”
Now, what, really is the difference here between CBS and Stossel? Stossel actively misled his viewers (refusing to distinguish pathologic strains of bacteria from harmless ones), lied about what tests were done to verify his claims, and ignored what his own experts told him about the tests that were done. He and his producers were made aware of the bogus nature of their story long before broadcast, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Stossel was ultimately forced by the network to issue a basically self-serving apology but as far as anyone knows, faced no other consequences.
I have no idea who this Stossel person is (yes I could have googled him but…) but using NZ’s fishing quotas as any kind of example for America is dishonest.
Firstly the quotas were a sore spot with many and to some extent still are. Secondly NZ is a country, not a group of states. The “central” bureaucrats are the bureaucrats. We have councils but the central govt makes laws like this. We have no states to make up contrary laws. Thirdly we, as a country are interested in conservation of resources…it’s out “thang”
The fact that the USA is a differently organized country, or that it’s a “sore spot,” doesn’t change the fact that the same approach would probably work. You may be correct in claiming that it would be a politically difficult solution to implement, but that wasn’t the point of the peice; it would still be a solution.
Canada’s much closer to the USA than it is to New Zealand in terms of its organization and attitude towards conservation, but we’ve had the same problems with our fisheries. (Canadians largely like blaming other countries for this, but it’s mosty our fault.) Stossel’s observation about the tragedy of the commons happened here, too, and pretty much destroyed key parts of the fishery.
Now, I’ll be the first to say, as a guy with an economics degree, that Stossel’s position here is simplistic. It is in fact NOT wholly clear that the “tragedy of the commons” is a universal truism. It’s a simple guideline that in some cases doesn’t seem to happen.
But I’ll keep sticking up for Stossel here. I think accusations that he sucks because he’s biased are a colossal pile of bullshit, not because he isn’t biased - he is - but because all commentary is biased, and the value of commentary is not measured by its lack of bias. The criticisms of Stossel here sound to me exactly like the criticisms of Michael Moore: “He’s biased, and I found where he made a mistake so he’s a liar, and anything with bias is lies and it’s not a documentary nyah nyah nyah.”
The value of Stossel or Moore isn’t whether or not they avoid bias, it’s whether or not they present an opposing viewpoint that makes you think and puts some new points into the discussion. In that sense I think they’re both wonderfully valuable. Moore is the only famous voice saying a lot of the things he’s saying; the mainstream has kind of come to him, with the popularity of MoveOn and all that shit, but he was the first one to talk about downsizing, and his commentary on gun control had a lot of interesting points, too, and so on and so forth. Is he biased? Big time. Is he 100% honest? Not really. But you’re a damned fool if you take anyone’s word without at least a little salt; a smart man hears Moore and adds Moore to the equation, while only a fool either rejects him totally or parrots him word for word (and I’ve known both kinds of fool.) A biased opinion will often be more incisive and have more to say than someone who tries to be neutral. It’s the listener’s job to adjust for the bias and use his brain and look up the sources and listen for an opposing opinion.
Same with Stossel. He’s biased and he did screw up on the organics bit, and as Isaid his “Tragedy of the commons” thing is simplifying a HUGE issue that even conservative economists think is quite complex, but he’s getting things onto primetime TV that nobody else seems to be saying in that medium. A libertarian voice is just as worthwhile an addition to the discussion as any other, and in a country were the media is utterly dominated by the tiring sight of more Democrat/Republican talking heads lurching about on their one-dimensional political spectrum, it’s actually MORE worthwhile than would be the addition of another Paul Begala or Tucker Carlson.
Seems to me that the problem with Stossel isn’t just that his politics taint his pieces. It’s that they cloud his methods. He’s always been prone to oversimplification and raging against straw men, all the while avoiding the more serious questions about the issue.
To put it another way, if John Stossel did a piece about God he would probably say “If there really is a God, I challenge him to strike me dead right now. Since I’m not dead, then God doesn’t exist.”
I could give a rats bum about his politics. He’s just a really shitty reporter whose well overdue to lose his job. I guess it’s popular appeal over quality.
Well, point of fact, we do have a variety of laws that address fraud and/or deception in various forms.
But I’m curious as to what you’re advocating here. Are you suggesting criminal penalties for news programs of the Stossel variety? Or civil penalties? If the latter, what’s your measure of damages?
I didn’t know he still had any fans. I mean, even Frankie Avalon was a better singer.
A couple weeks ago I was at a wake for one of Stossel’s sailing buddies. I had to cut out before he arrived lest I meet him, get to like him, and start making allowances for him in a “What did that darned John say this time? He’s such a joker!” manner.
Since Lib is a libertarian, my guess is that his suggestion we need another law regulating what should be a free-wheeling, laissez-faire, buyer beware business climate should be understood as a whoosh.
Perhaps it is a whoosh, but I’ve heard Lib say in the past that the only rule society needed was one against initiation of force (which, IIRC, would include initial fraud or deception). Since he brought it up in this specific context, I was hoping he might flesh out the mechanics of how it would work in this kind of situation.
What exactly would you like to have explained? Are you wanting something more along the lines of a theoretical overview, or something more along the lines of a Roberts Rules of Order for Libertaria? I can help you with the former, but I don’t have time for the latter.
